Author Peter Turchi will speak on October 1

UNC Asheville will host a talk by Peter Turchi, former director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Turchi will discuss “If You Lived Here, You’d be Home By Now: Reflections on Perceptions of Place” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1, at UNC Asheville’s Laurel Forum, Karpen Hall. This event is free and open to the public.

Turchi is the author of several books, including “Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer,” “The Girls Next Door” and “The Pirate Prince.” His stories have also appeared in publications such as “Ploughshares,” and “The Alaska Quarterly Review.” His short story, “Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning” was listed as one of 100 Notable Stories of 2002. Turchi has received Washington College’s Sophie Kerr Prize, North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other awards.

Turchi taught fiction writing at Warren Wilson College for 15 years. He now teaches at Arizona State University, where he is director of Creative Writing and director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

The talk is funded by UNC Asheville’s Sara and Joseph Breman Professorship of Social Relations.

For more information, call John Wood, UNC Asheville associate professor of Sociology, at
828/251-6977.